Picking up returnables for fun and profit

(Please do not crush your cans before you toss them from your moving car.)

My wife was a dutiful, frugal girl when she was young.  In primary school, she would routinely bring her dime or quarter every Tuesday on banking day, and have that money deposited in her bank account.  (You young people will not know about this, but back in the day, we actually had such a day at school.  But apparently, these programs are making a come-back.  Click on my title to learn more.)  At the end of several years of this kind of weekly deposits, she had saved several hundred dollars, which was quite an impressive sum in the 1950s.  When she went off to nursing school in 1965, her parents gave her $5 as spending money.  Months later, she still had that same 5-spot.  During three entire years at this school (she went year-round), during which her room and board were prepaid, she didn't spend more than about $25, although she used a Lazarus Department Store credit card to buy one dress for a Homecoming dance and a slip in preparation for our wedding shortly before she graduated.  That was it!



Those of you born to a later generation can not possibly believe what I am saying, but the appraisal above of what my future wife spent in college is the absolute truth.  We dated during most of that time.  We almost never went out, we never drank alcohol, we bought next to nothing.  We simply did not have the money to spend and, of course, a dollar went a lot farther than it does today. 

It should, therefore, come as little surprise that my wife collects empty soda and beer cans that she finds along the side of the road in rural New York.  Coke cans, DrPepper cans, Bud Light cans, plastic ginger ale containers.  Each one is worth a nickel.  The similarity in her mind between saving pennies each week at Dover Elementary School and picking up discarded nickels today is no accident.  As a child, she saw what that kind of regular saving could accomplish, and she never forgot that important financial lesson.

The problem is, the cost-benefit ratio is very different today than it was five decades ago.  To collect these nickels, we often stop the car in hazardous locations.  We have almost had our driver-side door taken off by a passing car, we have come close to putting the car in the drainage ditch in our attempt to move the car to a safe location off the road, and we have both twisted or sprained our ankles as we negotiated these same ditches.  Once I jumped into one of these pits to fetch a nickel or two and I ripped a hole in my $30 pants (= 600 cans).  Not a good deal.  Then, after you put the containers in the car, they invariably leak their remaining contents onto the seats or carpet and, for days, the car smells like you held a frat party in there. 

If the cans were crushed before being discarded by the side of road (data: about 5% of cans), they need to be straightened out enough so that the bar code can be read by the machine into which you feed them at the grocery store.  If they can not be straightened to the satisfaction of that contraption, you do not get your nickel.  I have fed some cans into that machine 8 or 10 times in an attempt to get it to read that code, only to have it belch out the can as if it was spitting on my torn pants.  The same thing happens if the can has been laying out in the weather for a couple of years; the bar code is so faint and unreadable that the machine gets the last laugh.

But this slow but sure strategy of accumulating wealth can pay off.  A few years ago, my wife was able to fly our two sons home from Denver without my knowing with pop can money to celebrate my 60th birthday.  And this is all with the return deposit at only a nickel.  There is discussion of raising the deposit to a dime in New York state.  If that happens, we might buy a second home in Costa Rica.  If the deposit ever went to a quarter, I would buy a fleet of used vehicles and hire a team of picker-uppers to scour Tompkins County for its booty.  Entrepreneurial opportunities abound. 

But already we have someone else picking up cans on the road in front of OUR house.  This is our territory, our grub stake, our can domain.  My wife has been hiding in our woods next to the road two days a week in hopes of ambushing the person.  She baits the shoulder of the road with 2-3 clean, Bud Light cans (I helped by emptying the cans) placed in a neat little bunch.  Irresistible.  We must stop this can poaching.

The secret to living longer, or at least thinking you are

(Times flies when you are having fun, but it is no fun trying to watch it fly.)

This month is a particularly weird month for DrTom.  (Sometimes I refer to myself in the third person.  After all, some of the greatest writers of the English language have used this technique.  It hints that the anecdote you are about to read will be a bit deep, even sinister.  Or, that I have bipolar disorder.  You be the judge.)  September has always heralded the beginning of the year for me.  January is not the first of the year, September is.  I am sure I feel this way because I commence the school year with this month, as many of you do also.  Even the Day Planners I buy begin with the month of September, not January.  January is one of those months that is just buried in the middle of the year, part way between the Xmas and the Easter holiday vacations.  For the past 56 years, September has meant the beginning of classes, either as a student or as a teacher, except for a couple of years in the army and a couple of sabbatic leaves from the university.  But September 2009 is the first September where none of that is true.

I'm not doing any of the activities that I normally do at this time of year and I am finding that I, well, I absolutely love it.  It is weird that I am not stocking up on pencils or notebooks or yellow sticky pads.  It is weird that I am not arranging field trips for my class, or writing a syllabus, or ordering books for courses I teach.  It is weird that I am not giving lectures, or making up exams, or trying to act all wise and intelligent.  It is weird that I am not trying to memorize the names of several dozen students.  This is probably a good thing, because I forgot the name of my dog yesterday, although I remembered that it rhymed with "goose".   This lack of doing "useful work" does make me feel guilty, like I am a lazy bum, or playing hooky, or just goofing off with no serious purpose in life.  What would my hard-working father say if he could witness this?  It has felt like one long episode of Ferris Bueller's Day Off .  Is it ok to feel this good and to have this much fun?

But there is a downside to having all this free time and doing exactly what I want to do every day, and enjoying every moment of it.  The time is going by too quickly.  Summer zipped by, autumn has begun, and every month seems to go faster and faster.  If someone is watching the atomic clock in Boulder, Colorado, I am convinced it has sped up over the past few months.  Please fix that thing.  Slow it down.  Even stop it.  I have more free time than I have ever had in my life, but I am getting farther behind on everything I want to do.  I didn't even have time to smoke a cigar yesterday.

They say that time flies when you are having fun.  Is that the phenomenon I am experiencing?  When I was teaching, September seemed to take forever to end, with all the planning, and worry, and attention to details required to present courses that students would find interesting and useful.  I liked that work, but it wasn't exactly what I would call fun.  So the time went slower then.  My old friend Paul Ehrlich was once quoted as saying in an interview for Playboy magazine, "Move to New Zealand.  You won't live longer, but it will surely seem like you do".  So that is one way to get through, I suppose.  Live a life that is a bit tedious, uncomfortable, or boring to give yourself the illusion that you are living a long life.  Is that the answer?  Long and boring, or shorter and fun.  Geez, what a dilemma.

Maybe the solution is for DrTom to do something one day a week that he absolutely hates.  That might slow down the clock just a bit and allow him to really appreciate the days when he is not doing that hated thing.  Every Wednesday morning, I could dust the shelves in my den.  I would remove each book and journal one by one, dust the shelf with Pledge, and return each item exactly where it had been, alphabetically by author.  I could follow this chore by raking the gravel in the driveway to make it smooth.  Then, I could watch several hours of reality tv about people I don't know who are trying to lose weight, build a house, or get a mate.  Yowsa!  That is a good formula for living to be 120, or at least feeling like you did.  But maybe you have a better approach to maximizing enjoyment while minimizing the quick passage of time.  Let me know; we could make a fortune.  If people are willing to pay $8 for a product that claims to reduce belly fat, they will certainly pay big bucks for a formula that makes you feel like you are living longer and enjoying life more.

But I think I have constructed a phrase that captures how I want to proceed: "Live long and prosper."  Isn't that great?  Very clever of me.  You just watch.  Some television series will pick that up and use it, and I won't get a lick of credit.

Should I get off my high horse?

(DrTom sometimes has trouble getting off his high horse.)

Yesterday's post was a serious one, and dealt with the plight of eastern deciduous forests.  On rare occasions, I can not help but pontificate on some environmental issue that bothers me.  But when I do that, my wife goes berserk: "don't write that kind of post for your blog, get off your high horse, quit being a professor, and just be funny".  Well, I am trying to make the transition from an environmental educator to a Dave Barry-like humorist, but I feel I need to offer some meaty ideas or perspectives along the way.  This is a real challenge. 

My recent students know that I think the global environment is "going to hell in a handbasket", to use my favorite expression.  Furthermore, I don't think there is a thing we CAN do to change the outcome.  More precisely, I don't think there is a thing we WILL do to change the outcome.  So why talk about it if it is a foregone conclusion?  Answer: because there is a slim chance that I am wrong about this.  I sincerely hope that this generation, with their passion and commitment, can turn it all around.  In the meantime, we will return to our regularly scheduled program.

Fretting about our forests

(Check out Great Smoky Mountains National Park to find some old-growth forest.)

I am a purist when it comes to thinking about habitats for plants and animals. I want it to be the way it used to be. I wish I could go back and see North America 500 years ago. I wish I could live another 300 years to see what the forest around my house will become. But there are many factors that cause a natural habitat to deviate from what it could be, or to be different from what it once was. In most of the world, we cut down whatever was there originally and planted food crops, built houses, or just abandoned the land after we harvested the original inhabitants.

I guess we are pretty lucky in the northeastern U.S., from a naturalist’s perspective. After the massive clearing of those fantastic deciduous forests, humans attempted agriculture and most of it failed economically. That process has allowed that vast area to regrow itself over the past six or seven decades in a process known as secondary plant succession. For example, the hill on which I live was a cattle pasture until 1960, so I now own a forest that is about 50 years old. This old pasture is developing as a forest mostly on its own. The trees are getting bigger and older, they flower and produce seeds, new seedlings appear and grow, develop into saplings, and so on.

So why am I on edge all the time about the biological process I am witnessing every day around me? For starters, we have a major mammalian herbivore living here—white-tailed deer. Deer eat many of these tree species, as well as various non-woody plants, and deer, therefore, influence the species composition and relative abundance of tree species in the future forest. In my forest, they seem to prefer maple, oak, magnolia, and tuliptree, and avoid ash, cherry, aspen, juneberry, and hornbeam. Given that deer densities in this region may be about 10 times their original density, they can have a significant impact on what our future forests become. Realize that I love deer; after all, I conducted my Ph.D. dissertation on Columbian white-tailed deer in the Pacific Northwest. But they have become the bane of my existence as a conservation biologist in upstate New York.



Second, there seems to be a new tree disease in the region every time I ask an expert. Chestnut blight decimated American chestnuts decades ago, Dutch elm disease pummeled American elms, and beech bark disease infected American beech; more recently we have to worry about the woolly adelgid on hemlocks and the emerald ash borer in ash trees. All of these have the potential to significantly reduce populations of these tree species and every tree disease listed above has something else in common—none of them are native to North America. The pathogens all got to this country from Europe or Asia. Introduction of non-native or exotic organisms is a major problem for the conservation of biodiversity globally (one of the so-called “Four Horsemen of the Environmental Apocalypse”).

And finally, there is the “invasion” of non-native shrubs in the forests of the U.S. In my area, the offenders are usually Tartarian honeysuckle and multiflora rose. I have both of them in abundance in my woods, or at least I did until I declared war a few years ago. I have spent many hours walking and pulling, or walking and clipping, or even walking and spraying the tough ones with the herbicide “Roundup.” And with the elimination of every individual comes that feeling of satisfaction that I am putting the system on the right track. We may not know all the species that were in this habitat centuries ago, and we may not know the relative abundances of the various native species back then, but we know that Tartarian honeysuckle and multiflora rose were not part of it.

Now that I am retired, I continue to patrol for deer with my Labrador retriever, pull up exotic shrubs, and monitor my trees for any mysterious death. I’d have to live until 2309 to see if I made any difference at all. And most of the time, I feel I am just spitting in the ocean, because the forces of degradation are enormous and the majority of the public will never know the difference. It sure is getting lonely out there.